Burnout prevention is institutional courage

Monika Neff Lind, PhD & Alexis A. Adams-Clark, PhD

When political aggression toward immigrants, trans people, and disabled people in the US intensified in January 2025, we struggled with how to help. We called representatives, donated to progressive efforts, and attended rallies. Those actions were meaningful and rewarding, and we began thinking about how to leverage our clinical training to increase our impact. We determined that adopting a support role for frontline activists was our best option.

Activists pursue social change through actions such as protesting and community organizing. Social movements depend on activists’ ability to sustain these efforts over time. Burnout occurs when a passionate, dedicated person experiences mental, emotional, or physical exhaustion and loses their motivation. Activists may be especially vulnerable to burnout.

When activists work within social justice organizations, this vulnerability to burnout represents an opportunity for those organizations to demonstrate institutional courage. Progressive organizations ask their workers and volunteers to walk into a storm every day. Activist workers and volunteers face backlash, direct and vicarious trauma, and long hours. While the organization may not create these sources of chronic, severe invalidation, the organization must act with institutional courage and provide a buffer for workers and volunteers or else risk committing institutional betrayal.

Many progressive organizations are eager to provide such a buffer but struggle to implement effective programs. In the last year, we have developed an anti-burnout program for progressive organizations based on an effective, evidence-based treatment called dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). We chose to base our program on DBT for two reasons. First, DBT is practical and skill-based, which suits the busy schedules and problem-solving orientation of activists and progressive organizations. Second, DBT’s foundational theory parallels the development of activist burnout.

DBT’s biosocial theory of emotion dysregulation helps us understand activist burnout. The theory says that emotion dysregulation develops when people with heightened attunement to emotions spend a lot of time in invalidating environments during their youth. In activism, we propose that burnout develops when activists –people with heightened attunement to injustice– spend a lot of time in invalidating political and cultural environments. Understanding activist burnout through a biosocial lens suggests that DBT skills may help sustain activists’ efforts.

In May of 2025, we launched an initiative offering dialectical behavior coaching workshops to activists in partnership with nonprofit immigrant defense organizations. To date, we have conducted four workshops with two organizations, reaching 60+ full-time activists. Each session focused on applying specific DBT skills to the unique stressors of justice work within their organization, as described by attendees. While we emphasized that these workshops were not group therapy, participants shared experiences consistent with our biosocial conceptualization of burnout, including frustration with bureaucratic barriers, distress related to detailed accounts of violence experienced by clients, and pressure to maintain unsustainable workloads.

We are eager to continue this work, and we invite activists and organizations to reach out to us about collaborating. We have shared our insights and actions here in hopes that they will fuel more efforts.